See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

THIS IS SUCH A GOOD POST THOUGH.

I think what really bothers me about the whole “men take care of the children and tend house because they’re not in charge” thing is that it reinforces the idea that traditionally feminine work SHOULD be undervalued. That there’s no way anyone could see raising children and think, “wow, what a valuable contribution to society”. Even though families are what societies are MADE of, and if you ignore the welfare of your children the society falls apart in a generation or two.

Imagine if women were seen as the ideal political leaders BECAUSE they’re the ones best suited for raising young children. What if it was assumed that government positions were sort of scaled-up households, and that only a leader who saw their subjects as their children could be fair and compassionate enough to rule effectively? What is a village, or a country, but an extended family?

On the one hand, the ability to use physical force effectively is super important for a low-tech society, and there’s always the threat of hostile military takeover, either from outsiders or via internal revolt. On the other hand, a society where all the men want to rebel is probably not a society that’s being run at all effectively, and there are other ways of maintaining control (ie religion, cultural traditions, propaganda, etc). Women could be the more educated group–in some ways that’s even intuitive, since a non-magical preindustrial society is one with a high infant mortality rate, which means it has to have a high birth rate to compensate, which means women will be pregnant a lot. If they have trouble consistently working physically demanding trades, why not assign them to jobs that require more mental exertion? Why not a society where all the lawyers are female, all the doctors are female, all the historians and most respected poets are female? If you keep that up for long enough, eventually that gets seen as an inherent sex difference, and men don’t exert physical force because holy shit they’d have no idea what they were doing once they gained power.

It doesn’t have to be these specific differences, of course. But I think that’s the thought process that most of the best worldbuilding comes from–why are things this way? How have they stayed this way? Just saying “what if women could tell MEN what to do!” is so boring compared to asking why we value the things we value. Besides, fictional societies that are created without asking why things are the way they are are not going to stand up under close scrutiny, whether they play into or subvert our expectations.

This is such an excellent addition to my post, @apprenticebard, I am rubbing my hands together with glee.

(Not aliens, but goes along with some discussions on how cultures might differ.)

The thing about a gender hierarchy is that most gender-based “x gender is better at y task” is bullshit, and so is “all x gender have (or are supposed to have) z trait.”  You will find all kinds of people of all kinds of gender presentations with all kinds of skills and traits.  I mean, there is an after-the-fact correlation where girls are taught one set of things and boys are taught another, but it has zip zero zilch nada nothing to do with aptitudes and interest.

So if aptitudes and interest and the raw stuff of skills and traits is gender-neutral, how come we think some things belong to one gender or another?  The answer is quite simple.  Because any trait or skill that society values gets assigned to the highest gender in the hierarchy.

Let me repeat that for the folks in the back.   Any trait or skill that society values gets assigned to the highest gender in the hierarchy.  And you can see this because as values change, tasks and traits get passed between genders.

The best example of this that I know of is sexual appetite.  See, one thing that really boggles peoples minds when they read medieval literature is that their assumptions about sex are, to us, backwards.  Ask anybody today who has the greatest sexual appetite, and they’ll say it’s men!  Who has the least sexual appetite?  Women!  A great deal of research has shown that this is bullshit, that there is a wide range in both men and women and gender tells you exactly bupkiss about sex drive, but even people who know this are guided by unconscious assumptions that men are ravening sex fiends and women are only in it for the emotions.

Except in the middle ages, they thought the exact opposite.  Men were pure, in it for emotions and cerebral affection.  Women were the ravening sex monsters who couldn’t control their lusts.  Why?  Because celibacy and sexual innocence was the highest sexual virtue.  Therefore, men had it and women didn’t.

This changed in the Renaissence, when potency and virility (and hence, lots of sex) became the highest sexual virtue.  Therefore, men have high sex drives and women don’t.

When you look at occupations today, and which ones we value and which ones we don’t, especially as you track changes over time, you will also notice that when men enter a field in large numbers, its prestige and pay rises.  When women enter a field in large numbers, its prestige and pay fall.  It is not that some jobs are high-status and men gravitate to those jobs, and women gravitate to “lesser” jobs.  Instead, JOBS THAT MEN DO ARE VALUED, AND JOBS THAT WOMEN DO ARE NOT.

So for example, in the USSR there were a heck of a lot more female doctors than there were in the west at the time.  Since “doctor” was a high-status occupation in the West, the West assumed that women were more equal in that they had access to high-status jobs.  Not so; women were just as oppressed in the Soviet regime as they were in the West.  The difference was that in the USSR, being a doctor was a low-status job.  Therefore, it was open to women.

So if you are going to build a matriarchal society from scratch, your first question should not be “which genders do which jobs” but rather “which jobs are going to be high status in this society, and which are going to be low-status?” and then assign the high status jobs to the women.

This! ^^^

This post was insightful and interesting, but also rubbing me kinda the wrong way, and I couldn’t figure out entirely why until I saw @beatrice-otter’s addition.

The first thing you need to decide, when building any fictional society, is how it sustains itself. What does it run on? How does it gain power, gain security, manage labour, acquire resources? This doesn’t mean that you have to be an expert in economies or politics (although research helps). What it means is that you have to have some kind of an idea of what sort of civilization you’re looking at.

The concept of a ruler-as-parent is not inherently matriarchal (paternalism in violently bigoted societies is often a major thing, in fact, and lots of patriarchal civilzations have equated kings with fathers). The concept of a conquest-driven warrior society is not inherently patriarchal, either, we just associate parenting with women and violence with men because of our own socially-conditioned presumptions. And any civilization which heavily preferences one group of people over another is probably going to be exploitative, because that’s the main motivation for encouraging social inequity - it lets the people in power hold on to their power, and accumulate even more by increasing the disparity between their authority and other people’s. (Which isn’t to say that some of the above ideas aren’t still good ways to look at things, just that it’s kind of an incomplete perspective).

The ‘elite’ set the tone for what is valued or devalued, as it suits the climate of their society. When computers were a new and niche thing, and no one was quite sure how far they would take off, programming was considered a branch of secretary work - it was women’s work (and WoC’s work).  As computers became more influential, and men in the field became more frustrated with having their work ‘devalued’ by its association with women, a concerted effort was made to drive women away from computing and associate it with them, instead. And now the typical image of a computer expert is, of course, a dude with glasses. Image campaigns were launched, more men were recruited to the field and fast-tracked to promotions, women were discouraged and pushed out via harassment and reduced career mobility, and historical retcons were put forward to make it seem as if they’d never been there to begin with. The social equivalent of headbutting your partner out of the classroom window on Science Fair Day and telling the teacher you did all the work yourself.

Of course, there is a question of how one gender initially gains this kind of advantage over another, and then builds off of it in order to reach the level of privilege where this sort of shit can fly. We don’t honestly know for certain, but women are, of course, strongly associated with the ‘gives birth’ end of the reproductive equation. Pregnancy, labour, breastfeeding, these things can all disadvantage someone when it comes to doing other stuff - especially if you’re doing them routinely because infant mortality rates are high and birth control is less-than-reliable. Free time and mobility are significant factors in who can explore their interests or focus on learning new skills, travel to other places, or investigate untested concepts. 

So, provided the genders of this hypothetical matriarchy are still composed along our own lines of thinking*, that should probably be taken into account when considering what runs this civilization**. Either the people going through pregnancies need to have an easier time of it for some reason (i.e. magic makes it easier on them, society is comprised of immortals who can waste time on loads of stuff anyway, etc) or the people not having babies need to have a harder time of it for some reason (i.e. magic makes it rougher on them, pregnancy provides some kind of immune boost that makes people more resistant to some kind of plague, etc).

Because the unpaid/unacknowledged part of the equation is the most important. A matriarchy which is run by rule of violence still might not be all that interesting to read/write about in the end (at face value, it can look less like a meaningful social critique, and more just like ‘look how horrible the world would be if women were in charge! This is what feminists want!!!’ which is.. tiresome). But in order to switch that around, step one is figuring out where the power is, and how this one group of people got a hold of it. That will give you the best indicator for how they should go about keeping it, which will, in turn, tell you what social roles are probably going to be the most lauded and compensated.

*More works which change this up would be pretty cool, I think. And shine some light on the arbitrary nature of a lot of presumptions about gender. 

**Of course, that’s if you don’t just want to shrug and go ‘I dunno, something happened in the early days of the major society we’re focusing on, and the advantage tipped far enough the other way that women have been able to build up on it since’ - that’s also totally fair.

HEY ALL, IT’S ME J

I’m building an app of the analog brain, so follow this account for updates!

(I have a day job and am doing this for fun, so yes the app will be open source and completely free)

@jay-avery​ I feel like we could have a conversation about how cool/interesting this is!

Explain …

So okay. When you have ADHD, one thing your brain is very very good at doing is making connections between things- ideas, concepts, people, states of mind, etc. This can be a superpower- if most people wouldn’t think to make a connection between doing a) and b), and you make that connection, sometimes you can outthink people who aren’t as good at snapping things together.

The problem comes in when you start connecting things that you don’t need to connect, like “mild displeasure” with “OH GOD EVERYONE HATES ME” or “I feel a little crummy” with “I AM THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD”.

So when we’re talking about Life Skills/ADLs, you gotta use that power to make your life easier, not harder. You gotta connect things when it makes your life better and NOT do it when it makes your life harder. 

Here’s an example of the habits: 

I had a stretch of time where I was too sick to do much of anything. I could barely get out of bed to get to the bathroom. I was walking with a stick and generally just… le dead. And one of the problems I had was that I could almost never remember to take my morning meds. 

I decided that the first time I got up to use the bathroom every day, I’d take my meds. That way I was taking them no matter how crap I felt- I had to get up to pee, like it or not- and it was getting done pretty early in the morning. 

Getting up to pee meant taking my meds; they were the same thing. I didn’t have to remember to take my meds separately, or set an alarm to remind myself, or anything like that. I just did it as part of something I had to do anyway.

As time went on and I started getting better, I realized I could do the same thing with other parts of my routine. If you connect something you need to do with something you have to do, the thing you need to do gets done.

So like… say I’m already in the habit of getting up to take a shower. I’ve lived in crappy apartments my entire life, so the water takes a minute to warm up. Since my countertop dishwasher is right outside my bathroom door, I’ll take a second to empty and load the dishwasher while the water’s still heating up. It just becomes part of the routine of taking a shower. 

You don’t have to think about Doing The Extra Thing. Connecting it to something you’re already doing means that, after a certain point, it just… happens, automatically.

 The problem comes in when you start trying to do this with tasks- things that you only have to get done once, that already have a fair few steps to them. Especially if that task is has a lot of steps, has a time limit, or is otherwise Hard for you. 

Figuring out tasks with dependencies (I have to do this before I can do this!) is already hard for us ADHDers. Sometimes what happens is that you bundle two tasks together- you decide you can’t do something until you’ve done the other thing, even though these tasks are in no way connected. 

Here’s an example: 

I have three packages I need to mail. One of them is a gift for a friend in Australia, which costs a lot of money; one of them is a package for my Etsy store which is Not Finished Yet, and one is a very late Christmas package. 

I might decide, “hey, I need to mail all three of these packages together! I can’t mail any of these packages until I bundle all of them!” But it’s probably smarter to mail them separately! I don’t want to make my friend with the late Christmas package wait any more, so I can mail that first, and then mail the Australia package when I have the money and the Etsy package when it’s finished. 

But if I insist that I have to bundle these tasks… I won’t get any of them done. I’ll be too stressed out about the Etsy package not being done to mail the other two packages, and then I will run out of money for the Australia package, and the Christmas package will not get sent til Labour Day.

If you’re stressed out about a task with a lot of steps, sometimes it’s worth it to check and make sure you’re not bundling multiple tasks together. Can you do the thing without doing the thing that comes before? Do you have to do the other thing immediately after? 

scrolling through the comments on this people with at least three separate native languages have chimed in to agree that English is the porn language. This… is amazing. I never knew.

oh oui. tu m’étonnes.

There is actually an interesting cultural/linguistic theory of explanation for this! I’m not a linguistics expert, just a person who likes learning languages, so my explanation will probably be a bit muddled, but I hope people find it interesting anyhow. You can read a relevant paper here; the authors of the paper call this phenomenon (or a phenomenon that’s very similar to it, at least) “emotion-related language choice theory,” but I don’t know if there’s a widely accepted term for it yet, despite the fact that people have been studying it for– I think close to 20 years? Quite a while, anyhow.

So basically, the cultural “naughtiness” of swear words/taboo words in your first language is something that’s very deeply ingrained– you might not hear these words at all in your early years, and if you do hear them there’s a good chance that there was some shame/reproach/anger involved if someone slipped and used them around you, or if your peers whispered them to each other on the playground to show how cool and grown-up they were. Also, people are generally very thoroughly versed in the complex nuances of how and when to use swearwords in their first language, and they fully understand the cultural weight of using these words to convey intense emotions.

When we’re reading, speaking, or writing in a non-primary language, however, we don’t bring all of that cultural baggage with us. For years linguists assumed assumed that it was easier to talk about highly emotional topics in one’s native language, because people generally feel more comfortable speaking the language(s) they’ve grown up with. A newer theory, however, posits that sometimes it’s actually easier to discuss these very taboo topics in a second or non-primary language, because we don’t have that culturally loaded sense of shame and emotional intensity weighing us down. Reading, for instance, smutty fanfic in a second language allows us to have a degree of removal from the topic at hand, which can be very liberating, because we get all the fun and excitement of reading smut with a great deal less socio-cultural nonsense.

(There’s another at least tangentially relevant thing here that I know even less about, which is a recently-studied mechanism wherein our brains basically refuse to fully translate non-primary language words with negative connotations all the way back to our native language, which lets us maintain a greater degree of distance from the negative thing, but I’ve been rambling for long enough, so I’m just gonna link the paper, and if people want to hear more about it I’d be happy to expound: link).

I am a linguist and I approve this addition.

There’s something about swearing in the first language that actually bypasses the higher brain functions entirely; you can take someone with global aphasia (complete inability to speak) due to a traumatic brain injury, and electrically stimulate that person’s amygdala (part of the limbic system that regulates emotion) and there’s a very good chance they will swear.

But, unless you’re exposed to multiple language from a young age, there’s a clear structural difference in how we process and store L1 vs. L+. No language but your first gets that built into the architecture of your brain, and the swearing just doesn’t work as well.